The Massive Continuity of Ducks

dduane:

prokopetz:
book–wyrm:
prokopetz:
Getting a firm handle on the geography of Ancient Greece both answers and raises questions.
On the one hand, the logistics of all those huge military campaigns make a lot more sense once you realise that many of the great city-states were basically within walking distance of each other. In many cases, those logistics boil down to less “establish a supply train” and more “well, make sure you pack a snack”.
On the other hand, all those episodes where great heroes spend years lost in the wilderness or adrift at sea become more difficult to reconcile. It’s like… how can you possibly get that lost for that long? If you found a good-size hill to climb, you can practically see your destination from your starting point!
It is a puzzlement.
One of the greatest moments of my life was when I realized the entirety of the Odyssey, which is described like this grand globe spanning adventure, probably just all took place around one tiny ass sea
Yeah, something that often throws modern readers is that most Ancient Greek cultures didn’t really have a concept of ocean voyages as we think of them. They relied heavily on coastal landmarks for navigation, which forced them to stay in sight of land. Very often they didn’t even stay on the ships full-time, instead going ashore to camp out each night. The closest they usually got to actual trans-oceanic travel was island-hopping - i.e., a series of short jaunts with daily stops at conveniently located islands along the way. If you ended up spending multiple days on a ship, that meant somebody had screwed up.
The upshot is that when you read those accounts of epic ocean voyages spanning dozens of far-off lands, you’ve gotta bear in mind that the places they’re describing are typically less than a day apart by sea.
Leaving aside the discussion of ocean-going journeys here – because by rights that could do with a whole post of its own – I need to deal with some of the statements regarding campaigning on land between the Greek city-states. While the OP’s basic premise is sound, the somewhat whimsical conclusions… could use examination.
First of all: the concept of the major city-states being “within walking distance” of each other parses at all only in the sense that most people didn’t have horses and would have had no choice but to march. I’m going to stick to the Peloponnese peninsula for the moment when citing examples, as it’s simplest and I’m assuming the Peloponnese is what the OP mainly means when “ancient Greece” is mentioned, as opposed to any of the many out-of-peninsula Greek cities and colonies scattered across the Mediterranean and the shores of Asia Minor.
Some sample distances from my ancient-world atlas’s map of classical-period Greece:
Messene-Sparta: 35 miles
Sparta-Argos: 40 miles
Thebes-Corinth: 50 miles
Corinth-Athens: 50 miles
Delphi-Athens: 120 miles
Athens-Sparta: 140 miles
So you get the picture. Unless you’re Steve Rogers and can comfortably carry your fighting gear between 35 and 140 miles in a day… “walking distance” as in “pack a snack”? Sorry… not even at the smallest of those distances.
To be clear about this you need data on how far a non-supersoldier army can march in a day. I’m going to mix my (temporal and cultural) metaphors a bit here and go straight to the professionals in this art, the Romans. A Roman army could do 18 miles a day over seven hours. Even assuming that the lighter-armed and (usually) significantly smaller armies of the Greek city-state period could move a little faster, they also generally had much worse roads to work with… so I think the differences are going to average out.
Therefore even the Messene-Sparta run implies two days on the road, full time. And then, if you’re a general, you know your army really needs a day to get over the march and get ready to fight. So, at least three days’ supplies, then. So that “snack” you packed had better have been a big one, considering how many calories a soldier on the march consumes in a day.* (And assuming you’re not going to acquire enough food from your looted enemy to be going on with, what will you eat on the way home? Oh, six day’s supplies then. Unless you plan to loot the country people on your way back. Which means that whatever city-state looks out for them is going to be on your doorstep in a few months. Hmm, what state are your city’s walls in? Just thought I’d check…) …And you’ll also need to bring enough water with you for at least the three days inbound. Because are you sure there’ll be enough available from springs and rivers and so forth? Especially because if you’re campaigning in the good weather — which a sensible general tries to ensure — in Greece, it’s going to be hot. And dry. How much water did you say you’d brought?…(One estimate: 12 liters per man per day “in hot dry climates”. That’s 12kg or 26 pounds. Times how many days?…)
The more stuff your soldiers have to carry besides their fighting gear, the less well they’ll fight. Your troops are not going to be very happy with you for having put them through days of this without adequate logistical support, i.e. that baggage / supply train. If somebody in the dark watches of the night convinces a majority of the others that this whole expedition is a bad idea… well, I leave the geopolitical consequences (and the possible personal ones to their leadership, meaning you) as an exercise for the student.
Now, as regards getting lost easily in (the implication is) such a small area? Well.
Consider your equipment, when you’re campaigning. Yes, you can orient yourself by sun and moon and stars. But you have only rudimentary maps. No GPS. Nothing to work with in terms of finding your way except the descriptions and experience of people who’ve been that way before. How good is their memory? You’re about to find out. And you’ll be in country full of local people who may not speak the same language as you (or speak an unintelligible dialect of it) and are very unlikely to take kindly to the prospect of the hundreds or thousands of you trooping across their land. And then come the intelligence issues. If you can figure out how to ask the locals for directions, they may lie. Or send you right into the arms of a hidden skirmishing force that’s been waiting for you.
As for “climb a hill”? It sounds nice in theory. But in much of Greece, what you see when you climb a hill is…more hills. After the basic (and famous) ruggedness of the terrain, there’s that pesky curvature of the Earth to consider: on the flat it limits what you can see to approximately 3.5 miles in any direction. The equation is pretty straightforward. And the effects are surprising. If you’re standing on top of the Burj Khalifa, the horizon is only 64 miles away. If you’re standing on top of Mt. Everest, it’s 209 miles. That’s as good as it gets. If you have known high landmarks to triangulate on, that will help you a little… but what if you don’t? And even if you do, there are atmospherics to take into account, leaving more distant landmarks capriciously shrouded in mist and haze, or (if you’re marching at a lower level) hidden again by Earth’s curvature. If you can’t get a clear visual shot at a known high landmark, and you’re in unfriendly country, and your native or non-native guides are dead, or unreliable, you have a big problem.
So getting and staying lost in the ancient world, especially on campaign, is way too easy, even over short distances. And for the longer ones? Try reading the Anabasis. It was no picnic… and not a situation I’d have wanted to be caught in…
*There is some discussion about the amounts, as you’d expect, but for the Romans — using them as the yardstick again – the intake seems to have varied between 3000 calories per day when marching and 6000 calories per day when fighting. This seems to map fairly closely onto modern expectations, at least at the low end: US soldiers, for example, are expected to have at least three 1300 calorie MREs per day. (Though as we know from the war in Iraq, whenever possible they would ditch the MREs in favor of curries from the Brits’ mess tents. The mini-Tabasco bottles from the MREs, though, were much prized for trading to allied troops in theater.)

maudnewton:

fieldbears:
wildwomanofthewoods:
mindblowingfactz:
In a private cemetery in small-town Arkansas, a woman single-handedly buried and gave funerals to more than 40 gay men during the height of the AIDS epidemic, when their families wouldn’t claim them. -Source
One person who found the courage to push the wheel is Ruth Coker Burks. Now a grandmother living a quiet life in Rogers, in the mid-1980s Burks took it as a calling to care for people with AIDS at the dawn of the epidemic, when survival from diagnosis to death was sometimes measured in weeks. For about a decade, between 1984 and the mid-1990s and before better HIV drugs and more enlightened medical care for AIDS patients effectively rendered her obsolete, Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She had no medical training, but she took them to their appointments, picked up their medications, helped them fill out forms for assistance, and talked them through their despair. Sometimes she paid for their cremations. She buried over three dozen of them with her own two hands, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.
How have I never heard of this?
People like her should be remembered. And even more importantly, we must remember that there was a time in our history when we needed someone like her.
“When Burks was a girl, she said, her mother got in a final, epic row with Burks’ uncle. To make sure he and his branch of the family tree would never lie in the same dirt as the rest of them, Burks said, her mother quietly bought every available grave space in the cemetery: 262 plots. They visited the cemetery most Sundays after church when she was young, Burks said, and her mother would often sarcastically remark on her holdings, looking out over the cemetery and telling her daughter: ‘Someday, all of this is going to be yours.’
‘I always wondered what I was going to do with a cemetery,’ she said. ‘Who knew there’d come a time when people didn’t want to bury their children?’"
Wonderful woman. Wonderful story.